Green Group discussion

Billions are drinking water contaminated with plastic --- In the United States, plastic fibers were found in water samples collected from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s headquarters, Congressional buildings and Trump Tower in New York.

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/natio...

“...it only breaks down into smaller pieces of itself, even down to particles in nanometer scale — one-one thousandth of one-one thousandth of a millimeter. Studies show particles of that size can migrate through the intestinal wall and travel to the lymph nodes and other bodily organs.”

http://www.hindustantimes.com/environ...

The benefits and challenge of plastic film mulching in China. While it cuts down on water usage and increases crop yields without chemicals, when it is left in the fields it permeates into the soil.

http://www.world-agriculture.net/arti...

Margaret Atwood Has Some Fixes For A Plastic Crisis That’s Slowly ‘Killing Us’

Apparently for some people, eco-fiction is simply entertainment.

This article appeared in Yahoo's Entertainment section. Why Yahoo would list this article as entertainment is beyond me except maybe they thought that an author like Margaret Atwood writes fiction, so if she had anything notable to say it would be entertaining.

The original source of the article was Huff Post collection of articles about plastics.

I have been seeing these articles about plastic popping up here and there but did not realize they were all saved in one place.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/topic/o...

It is listed under Huff Post Impact section, but they have a section that is ocean oriented where all the plastic pollution ocean articles are listed in one place.

The Impact section is a collage of articles apparently relating to social issues, but the main Impact page does not clearly indicate how to get to the Ocean section.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dept/im...

This only shows how unworkable the current system of indexing is on the internet and how easy it is to be over looked. If you know where to look you can find it, but if you don't know, chances are you wont easily find it.

Basically we need to treat plastic like it is radioactive. Keep it locked up, don't throw it around like it was garbage, account for every piece of it.
This can be done by replacing plastics with items that are made of
Easily Biodegradable materials
Organics
Ceramics
Glass
Weeds
Natural Fibers
Pure Carbon
Metal

Wood is a possibility but them we'd probably run out of trees, weeds would be better.

We are past the age of debate. Margaret Atwood isn't debating plastic. She is saying there is no other option but to treat every piece of plastic responsibly.

In this case, responsibly means not using them unless there is absolutely no other choice.

It doesn't mean we continue to make everything out of plastic, and then recycle that plastic back into everything we are still making out of plastic.

Don't plastic clothes shed plastic fibers into the oceans?
Do we think the oceans care if the fibers came from clothing made out of recycled plastic?
At the very least, for plastic fiber clothes, we are suppose to:

1) wash them less often,
2) use front loading machines,
3) buy a special bag to trap the fibers.

https://myplasticfreelife.com/2017/03...

Of course this is happening. Right? Just like all those fluorescent energy saving bulbs didn't end up in landfills, didn't put mercury into the ground that never had mercury in it before.

What's wrong with these solutions, is it perhaps that gazillionaires, and captains of industry, and the manufacturing industry themselves are supplying these solutions which don't fix anything but do put money in their pockets, which is what they really want in the first place. You don't become a gazillionaire by helping people out. You get there by taking things from people who don't have the facilities to process the raw resources they own, so they get paid pennies on the dollar so someone with a lot more money can use those cheap resources to make far more money, and not kickback any of the proceeds to the people on the ground who pay the price they never got paid every day of their lives.

Sustainability is another one of those words with so many meanings. For a lot of people it means that you keep doing what you are doing, only you do it in a responsible [another one of those words] manner so that you can keep doing it over and over again. It really just means only spend the interest of your investment, not the principal. Like recycling one time use plastic items into plastic items than can be used more than once. It looks good on paper, but we are still using plastic which still is shredding off into the environment, including the water we drink.

Follows a quote from a Care2.com article.

Break Free From Plastic member organizations in the Philippines recently conducted an 8-day coastal cleanup and brand audit in Freedom Island, a critical area for migratory birds, to identify the most polluting brands. Turns out, six international brands are responsible for roughly 54 percent of plastic packaging pollution found there.

Among them are corporate behemoths like Nestlé, Unilever and Proctor & Gamble —parent companies of the brands sitting in your kitchen and bathroom right now. Break Free From Plastic is encouraging anyone doing coastal cleanup activities to combine it with a brand audit, because coastal cleanup is simply not enough. For more information visit Plastic Polluters.org.

http://www.care2.com/greenliving/8-3-...

That is a good idea.

I have been saying for years that the firms making the plastic and selling it should be footing the cleanup bills. I include fishing debris makers in this list.

Nice thread and I agree with the comments made so far. What I find frustrating is that even with more coverage of the impacts of plastic waste, "we" continue to have the same behavior.

5 TRILLION plastic bags are made each year. Roughly 2/3 of single use water bottles in the US are NOT recycled. Though the worlds population has increased roughly by 25% in the last 20 years, our consumption of clothes (many made with synthetic plastic fibres) has increased 400%. In 2000, the world's cotton and polyester production were about the same, since then cotton production has been roughly the same but polyester production has quadroupled.

Getting the manufacturers to help with cleanup is a good step, but "we" need to use less as well. There is no easy answer for this.

I know many youth that are in grades 10-12 and I asked them if they knew about micro plastic pollution from clothes. Only a few did. So we could put a bit more effort into education of our youth and the general population as well. Simple things like fabric content, or being mindful of the containers we buy, such as using bar soap instead of the popular liquid kind.

The bigger problem is to get people to care about the problem. To get them to read the label on clothes before they buy it. To not use plastic bags, etc. In my opinion, people really don't care that much because they are so dissociated with nature. If people are not regularly exposed to "natural" nature, they will not have a desire to change their behaviors.

This is not easily resolved and is a major topic on it's own.

This is the result of heavy rains flooding inland areas. The rain is gone. The floods are gone, but the pollution generated by the flood remains long afterwards.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/...

I would add that this much plastic on the surface is blocking the light from entering and passing through the water. In clear seas with no silt, the light can go down 30ft or more. Plants depend on it and form the base of the food chain.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/e...

Scientists are finding the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is "increasing exponentially."

"Seventy-nine thousand tons of plastic debris, in the form of 1.8 trillion pieces, now occupy an area three times the size of France in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii."

"The Garbage Patch has been described before. But this new survey estimates that the mass of plastic contained there is four to 16 times larger than previously supposed, and it is continuing to accumulate because of ocean currents and careless humans both onshore and offshore."

"The 'patch' is not an island or a single mass, leading some scientists to object to the name (which the current study uses). Instead, it’s a large area with high volumes of plastics, one in which concentrations increase markedly as you move toward its center. The debris ranges from tiny flecks to enormous discarded fishing nets, which make up 46 percent of the material, the study found."

I have seen pictures in the past of large plastic items in the gyres so I am not certain why people were surprised at finding big items.

The Sargasso Sea is a pile of plastic garbage and that has been know since the 70's. Strange that it took 20 years for people to figure out the other ocean gyres would also be collecting garbage.

The estimate of 88,000 tons seems to be way too low when the total production since the 1950's is estimated to be 200 trillion tons, annual production is now up to 200 billion pounds a year of plastic products. Think of it as the Earth colliding with a giant plastic asteroid that broke into an infinite number of pieces that got stuck in the Earth up to 10 feet deep and are still floating around in air and the water. Plastic Winter.

There are 4 other gyres filled with plastic in the oceans around the world. I would not be surprised if some of the plastic in the Pacific came from the Atlantic and vice versa. Every country is responsible for plastic in the ocean, it would have been nice if the article had mentioned that.

If a country is not bordering an ocean with a plastic gyre in it but it's plastic products are in it, then they did start the process of that plastic arriving in the ocean. Returning spent plastic items to the manufacturer so they can dispose of it safely might help to cut down on the plastic pollution situation. That doesn't include recycling it back into new plastic items as that isn't helping anyone.

Making the article palatable for human consumption. As usual, people are too busy looking everywhere except at themselves as evidenced by the title of the article, Sea Birds Are Filled With Plastic. It's getting into all animals, even plants, including our bodies. It's in the bottled water we drink. Which means it is also in prepared foods as well that are made from water with a plastic content. It's also in the shell fish who live by filtering garbage out of water, only now they have to deal with our crap that can't be safely handled once it falls in the dirt. They can't spit it out, it gets stuck in their flesh. Bon appétit.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/n...

Algae grow on any surface, which is why shellfish and fish are eating the algae-covered tiny shreds of plastic.

Even if it would be unproductive at present for people to remove the shreds from seaweed tangles in the gyres by hand, they could start by removing the large pieces.

I think we need to find a way to make and enforce international laws to prevent boats from dumping fishing nets. At the very least, individual countries should take action.

Here is an article from The New Republic about plastic:

https://newrepublic.com/article/14798...

I found it hard to believe USA is at the bottom of the list. It should be taken into account that US helps fuel the plastic industry, completely supports it and uses it quite extensively, and sends plastic to other countries to be disposed off.